A Leap of Faith

from Hemmings Motor News

What could possibly go wrong? Wait, let's rephrase that: What could possibly go wrong that I hadn't prepared for? This is the sort of question you find yourself dwelling on as you're getting a car ready for its first trip since Frampton Comes Alive was released, a car that hasn't moved so much as an inch under its own power since Robert De Niro introduced moviegoers to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
Some sensible preparations were clearly called for. I tossed a variety of tools into my battered Craftsman toolbox and loaded it into the trunk, where it kept company with a couple of Pres-tone jugs filled with water, four quarts of oil, jumper cables, a floor jack and a few spare parts that I could imagine needing on my 180-mile round trip. My cell phone was charged, and I had the emergency numbers of both of the travel clubs I belong to. Best of all, I had my ace in the hole, the safety net to end all safety nets: Dirk Burrowes's phone number.
It was all Dirk's doing that I was even considering making such a long first trip in the Rover, a car that I had only gotten running two days earlier after its 33-year snooze. Dirk plays a major role in the tiny world of Rover enthusiasts, both as an avid collector and a tireless supplier of parts and advice, and it was his annual event, RoveAmerica 2009, that had lured my 1968 2000TC out of the shelter of the garage. Foolhardy? Not when you consider that Dirk had a trailer waiting in the event that I needed rescuing.
Even as late as the morning of the get-together, when I was tending to last-minute details, I still wasn't sure that asking so much of the Rover was a good idea. The easy thing would have been to take the safe route, to use my daily driver and plan to get the TC to next year's event. But where's the fun, the challenge, in doing the easy thing? The car ran flawlessly on its trial run to the town line and back, and though the ancient, rusted-out exhaust was booming, the sun was shining and prospects seemed bright. So I pointed the Rover's nose east toward my destination: Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
The speedometer called it quits before I'd reached the county line, but that was no real problem--I just kept up with the traffic, which was easy enough for the Rover. The "IGN" light glowed a troubling red, but I chalked that up to the PerTronix electronic ignition I had installed. Both the temperature and gas gauges had reported for duty, and the clock even kept the correct time. Who says British electrical systems are rubbish?
I made it to the meet by early afternoon. I had barely gotten the words "ignition light" out of my mouth before another Rover enthusiast, James Radcliffe, grabbed his multitester and started crawling over the engine bay. He diagnosed that the generator was no longer generating, and it's at this point that the true genius of my plan revealed itself: Where better to have a Rover breakdown than at a Rover convention, with easy access to a bottomless supply of expertise, tools and parts? We pulled the car into Dirk's shop, where Dirk, James and I spent a couple of hours swapping out the generator for a new-old-stock Land Rover unit that Dirk loaned me. Bright lights for the trip back home! We said our goodbyes shortly before midnight. What could possibly go wrong now?
What went wrong was that the hydraulic clutch, which had been such a trouper up to this point, began to lose the will to live. Ignoring my misgivings, I backed out of Dirk's shop into a driving rain and headed west toward home. When I stopped to fill the tank, the clutch gave up entirely, so I started the car in first gear and shifted without the clutch from then on. This would have been less of a challenge if I had replaced the deteriorated bushings in the shift linkage; as it was, I had my hands full finding fourth.
Aside from twice attracting the attention of the local police--once for an ill-advised attempt to get around a red light, and once for having a burned-out headlight--the rest of the trip passed without drama, and it was with profound relief that I pulled into my driveway sometime before 2 in the morning. The final score: Rover 1, tow truck drivers 0.

This article originally appeared in the September, 2009 issue of Hemmings Motor News.